The US Clearing House wants to revamp banking security laws

February 16, 2017 – The security at Airports, Banks, and many other places was minimal before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The banking sector was enjoying a period when the rules and regulations were very lenient, but all of that changed when the twin-towers came down in 2001. Since then, the US government has imposed several laws/rules on the banking sector, which are designed to help US security agencies to catch criminals who are involved in sending/receiving money for terrorism purposes. One of these rules made it compulsory for bank employees to report any transaction that they think is suspicious.

The government designed these rules and regulations to make sponsorship of terrorism difficult, but are these laws really working? If you ask the banking sector, they would definitely say no because they want to save more money by quickly processing transactions without worrying about suspicious activity. When a banking officer, or employee, reports a transaction, he has to waste some of his precious working-time and it costs the bank money because they have to put some extra resources for complying with the said security rules. Truth of the matter is that banks [especially the big ones] only care about how much money is circulating in their bank and how much money is coming into their accounts. They only want to make more money and it seems to me that they don’t want to help the security authorities to combat terrorism.

According to some news sources, the US Clearing House is preparing a proposal for the Trump Administration. This proposal will ask the government to remove/modify the rules and regulations that previous governments have imposed after 9/11. The US Clearing House is a huge financial institution that offers different kinds of services. For one, they act as a moderator for financial transactions between different parties. For instance, in Forex trading, banks and other financial institutions place huge trade orders. A lot of these are leveraged transaction; meaning that trading parties can execute big trades while fixing a very small amount of deposit, which is known as Margin. The US Clearing House also provides services to Forex brokers who are offering Over-the-Counter markets.

The US Clearing House has the backing of some of the world’s biggest banks including JPMorgan Chase and the Bank of America. As you can imagine, this is a powerful institute, so you can expect the government to listen to what they are saying. To top it off, President Trump has already announced that he will let go of laws and rules that are adding burden on financial institutions.

Do you think the current anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism laws are really useless? Or perhaps the greedy banks want to cut-loose these rules so that they can make even more money?